Technovia

Amazon UK and mechanical Turk

Not sure if this is new, but Amazon UK is sending out emails promoting Mechanical Turk. Was it available in the UK before?

No, Twitter isn't a revolution in media speed

Lots of Twitterers commented on how they heard from Twitter first about the LA Earthquake, and how amazing it is. Not so fast:

"I'd suggest a far more likely scenario is that Twitter is the first place that bloggers and other chatterati first saw it, and as they are the ones who tend to talk about it in the blogosphere echo system which consumes nearly all their attention, that's clearly where they perceive it was first reported.....

The poor old mainstream media of course are hobbled by totally unreasonable requirements such as checking and confirming facts before its broadcast, unlike a social network."

(Via broadstuff.)

Google notebook now supporting Safari

Google Notebook has had a bit of an update, and it looks like it now supports Safari as well as Firefox and IE. At least, it no longer complains if I use Safari with it.

Why self-correction in blogging is a vice, not a virtue

It's hard to understand why after ten years of blogging, people are still arguing that the difference between journalism and blogging is that journalists take time to get it right. But that's apparently what Robert Scoble was faced with at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference.

Robert goes into some detail of his experience on his post (more of which momentarily), but to anyone who's been around media and news it's pretty obvious that this is a canard. Journalists don't always take time to get it right: in fact, what some of them do is no more than take time to check they won't get sued for it, which is a very different thing. In the hunt for a good story, one which sells papers, truth is sometimes a secondary consideration.

Robert, though, raises some points which are also canardical (if that's a word), particularly about the ability for blogging to "self-correct". This idea of fast self-correction is an important one, and not just for blogging. The idea is simple: it's fine to go back to a story and amend it later, because the correction gets around the web as quickly as the original story. It's agile project management for knowledge: the first draft can be wrong, as long as you get it right at some point in the future.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this vision of constant redrafting of stories is very appealing to many journalists, too. It's even more appealing to editors, under pressure to get stories out fast and revise them later. The idea of working on a story for days, weeks, and even months is anathema to many modern journalists.

But the problem is that "a story" has a life far, far beyond the original post. For a popular blogger like Scoble, the original words are likely to be picked up and reposted hundreds of times.

Watching the development and correction of stories, there's something interesting that I've always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that's 100,000 people who believe the original story - and unless Scoble's readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that's a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

This situation is really compounded if the original post comes from someone without a vast readership, but which gets picked up by a well-read blogger. In this case, if the well-read blogger doesn't pick up on the correct, it's likely that the word will never have a chance of getting out - and the original, false information will be far more widely spread.

Of course, this is not a blogging versus journalism problem: it's simply something that will always be true of fast publishing systems which are democratised, in the way the web is now. It doesn't matter what the original source is: if it's widely read and commented on, a later corrected version isn't carried in the same way. By the time you correct, the attention of people has moved on.

Amazon UK and mechanical Turk

Not sure if this is new, but Amazon UK is sending out emails promoting Mechanical Turk. Was it available in the UK before?

Try out RememberTheMilk - coming (soon!) to iPhone

Since getting the new iPhone, I've been using OmniFocus for to manage all the things that I have to do. But the only downside with OmniFocus is that it's Mac only - so if you're using Windows or Linux you're basically out of luck.

If you're in this situation, I'd recommend you take a look at RememberTheMilk (RTM). RTM is an incredibly flexible time management system that's capable of scaling from a single to-do list, all the way up to a complete, complex GTD-based system. It's also got an API, which means that as well as working through your browser it can be access through other applications. And, as a post on the Remember The Milk Blog demonstrates, people are really putting some good work into nice little apps that work with the API.

They're also working on a native iPhone app, which should give you access to your to do's even when you're out of signal range - although if you are in signal range, the iPhone web app is very good (winning an Apple Design Award at the last WWDC). There's also native apps for syncing with BlackBerry or Windows Mobile to do lists, and Google Gears-based offline access for Firefox users.

One of the best thing about RTM is the shared to do lists. Say you have a list of things which need doing around the house. These can be shared with your partner, so that you can both see the full list - and share the work!

Most of the features of RTM are free, although you can optionally pay $25 per year for "pro" features like BlackBerry/Windows Mobile syncing. Given that this works out at less than $0.50 per week, I think that's money well spent. When the native iPhone app comes out, I'll definitely be taking another look.

Oyster Card hack can be published

Oyster card hack to be published.

"In its ruling, the court said: 'Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings'"

In other words, if you messed up and released something with a security hole in it, it's your own silly fault and you'll have to take the hit for it.

A marvellous ruling, that will actually be good for business in the long run, as it will discourage companies from promising to its customers that a system is secure purely because they think they can clamp down on any information about it that appears.

Good for Elgato

EyeTV does not support broadcast flags or other DRM measures:

"EyeTV doesn't support any broadcast flags or other methods of restricting the use of television programs.

Such methods have been encouraged by the television and movie industry - to prevent recording or sharing certain shows - but they are not required by law. Legislation does vary country by country, but at the present time there are no such restrictions in the locations where EyeTV is available.

Therefore, EyeTV and other Elgato software will ignore any flags or other voluntary DRM methods - if you can watch a program, you can record, edit or share it as you see fit."

Good for Elgato. Broadcast flags are noxious, ineffective, and stupid. A much better way of moving forward for the TV industry would be making content available to buy immediately after transmission - as with music, the only people who will choose to pirate when content is easily and cheaply available for sale are those who couldn't afford it anyway.

(We have a Mac mini set up in the living room, using EyeTV to record shows, which are then archived into iTunes linked to a 1Tb drive. Even though we also have an excellent Humax PVR, we use the EyeTV much more.)

(Via TUAW.)

Where did it all go wrong? When Labour started telling lies - Telegraph

Link: Where did it all go wrong? When Labour started telling lies - Telegraph.

"A senior academic from Imperial College says that universities have to run catch-up classes for many students with excellent A-levels. And the National Audit Office reports that poor A-level results were the main reason why state school pupils fail to get into a decent university."

It's worth noting that this isn't something you can actually pin totally on Labour. When I was a postgrad back in the early 1990's, the quality of writing ability in students dropped notably over five years - despite them all apparently getting better A level results.

The reason, of course, was the massive expansion of higher education initiated by the Tories and continued under Labour. It was, and is, a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.

Somebody put Kevin Kelly back in the box, please

Infoporn: Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer:

"Indeed, a hyperlink is much like a synapse in the brain."

Only if you know absolutely nothing about the way the brain works.